Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  Honestly!

  Her voice in his ear’s a hoarseness he loves to hear. That and her money was why she got away with everything.

  *

  “Do you remember that first summer when Sally locked herself in her room every night, and the door stuck? It wouldn’t shut for her to lock it. I had to push from the other side.”

  “I don’t know why you’d want to remember,” Clive said, “and you’re smiling.”

  But she had liked that noisy, nighttime business.

  On Sunday afternoons, Dinah’s grandfather let the Newfies lie near the fire in the den and watch old Westerns with him. Dinah said, “Whenever one of the dogs farted, and it was almost always Tom, my grandfather lit a match.”

  Dinah said, “Sally had nothing to be afraid of then.”

  “Her mother was living with that man.”

  “Sally should get a dog.”

  Clive said, “She has Wisia.”

  But only in the summers and six weeks of this one at camp — and that was money well spent. Dinah had seen the girl kick Sally in a most hurtful place, stood witness, helpless to part them — afraid really. Wisia was more respectful of her other mother and why was that?

  Dinah said, “Sally’s driving up from Portland.”

  “You amaze me,” Clive said.

  “I’m glad,” she said. For Sally’s sake, she hoped the Bournes would both vacate although she felt maternally toward them, felt other stirrings, too, and sadness.

  The Bridge House, Maine, 2004

  The knock on the door was the loose door itself in the wind, and Isabel kept her eyes shut and her face in the sun. The door in the wind, in the wind and the pitched light of late afternoon in the backyard, she saw where she was and, too, for an instant, a not so tall man stretched out on the bulkhead: Ned of the slender ankles, shapely leg. Too handsome.

  His story always started with I was invited to this. .

  Isabel shut her eyes and listened for a voice, a word more, which, when it came, came from a woman. Woman? Women?

  On the kitchen table near the open windows was a tiny bottle of fluttery sweet peas feigning faint of heart. A note, too, but Isabel didn’t move to get it. The Bridge House was not reliable.

  Stupid.

  The Bridge House, 1858, yellow clapboard, the yellow almost all worn away. Old trees. Old windows, wiggly glass. No bridge figured into it; the first owner’s name was Gray, and after him, a spinster daughter, Margaret. Occupied for more than a hundred years by the same family, a New England farmhouse not so far from the road, a winter house, austere and brave, high elevation, hard on a hill overlooking the bay! The bay and, but for Mr. Weed and his establishment, open meadow, pines, outcroppings. But Mr. Weed, the menacing Mr. Weed, lived at the bend in the road in a warren of outbuildings, where he serviced lawn mowers, sold parts. She had introduced herself — she had seen the photo of his ancestor and seen his ancestors’ graves at the Seaside Cemetery. Mr. Weed was on his knees and too old to get up quickly.

  “Please don’t!” she had said even as he stood.

  On clear days Isabel could see Acadia in the distance.

  *

  Sally said to her father, “You think I’m staying forever. I know what you’re thinking.”

  “You do, do you?” Clive asked.

  Dinah was out of the door with her arms open, bumping past him and into the cushion of Sally in slacks. Dinah, no bigger than a darning needle, put her arms around Sally’s waist and hugged, exuberant. As long as they keep it to themselves, why shouldn’t he suffer his daughter’s visit? Dinah wanted company, whereas he was no sooner in company than he wanted to be out of it and back in the barn. Not that he was always productive, Christ, no. A lot of looking went into what he was doing. For a time he had liked to look at Isabel, bony as she was, but he was looking elsewhere now. A fox, a fox and her kits, had come upon him from time to time when he had set up in the field to paint early in the morning, and he was smitten. Mama fox, lighthearted in the high grass, when her focus turned on him, she held still; she stood self-possessed and cool and looked right through him. Mama fox. The kits were merely foolish.

  “I’m happy to see you, too, Dad,” Sally said and she made an affectionate move toward him as she dragged what looked like camping gear behind her.

  “Smells syrupy in here. Did you make waffles this morning, Dinah?”

  Had she? He didn’t remember. “No one tells me anything,” Clive said, more to himself than to anyone listening, moving out of the kitchen to the back porch. Dinah already at the disaster site, saying, “Shared custody is often not shared.” He wished there were some other story. People were moving about him even as he moved away. Dinah, last glimpsed with branches of weigela in a Ball jar. He remembered that part of breakfast at least.

  *

  The last corner before the last so sharply inclined to the shore that Ned’s car, now Isabel’s car, fishtailed off the road — an accident! The tree broke the car’s fall, or who knows how far down the hill she might have gone. Isabel was unhurt, but when she dared to see how far down was down, she got sick. And this fuck-up after all she had accomplished in asking Mr. Weed to help her get her car — on Pearl near the Clam Box, where else? She must have forgotten she was driving or something equally stupid — a dumb accident might explain her accident. Embarrassed, wiping her mouth, not quite relieved. The back window of the car was a blown-out sheet of glass — green diamond edges beguiling as a gemstone. The back door was dented, half-open. Otherwise the car worked.

  “My God!”

  The policeman did not remind her of any person in authority.

  “It was so easy,” she said, “in slow motion and so much damage, but I’m all right, thank you, really. That such a tiny accident should cause so much damage. The car’s worth nothing now, I guess. Not even trade-in. Scrap.”

  Once home, she sat on the granite step looking out at the bay. It took a while before the sensation of falling ceased.

  She talked to her mother for a time and was comforted by her terrorized reaction. “Why?” Her mother said, “You have to ask me why I’m so upset? After this whole shameful business. .” The sentence was abandoned. “Please,” her mother said, “if it’s about Ned, I don’t want to know.”

  *

  “Ned was hoping for guests,” Isabel said when Dinah and Sally arrived. “We’ve got rum and vodka, gin, six or seven bottles of modest house red. I’m leaving it here with you, if that’s okay.”

  “No,” Sally said. “Don’t you want it?”

  “I’ll take it,” Dinah said, “but Isabel don’t drive back to New York right away, at least stay through the weekend.”

  “I hadn’t planned staying longer,” Isabel said. She thanked them for the surprise of the sweet peas, and then she was crying. She was crying, and Dinah and Sally led her out of the kitchen into a front room with sun. They sat on either side of her on the sofa.

  They didn’t know about the car. Clive had not told them, but they wanted to know, animated by talk about accidents with machines and people: the surprising force of slight collisions and accident lore. How once, Dinah remembered, a not-so-large tree limb overloaded with wet snow fell on the tool shed and crushed it.

  The usual disaster commiserations brought the women together: They had all dinged some car, lost keys, forgotten gas; they had surprised themselves with their own fragility: falling on a street, banging into something with an edge. Tables!

  “I don’t remember there being so little furniture,” Sally said, “but you put in new screens?”

  “No,” Dinah said. “I sent Nan Black to clean before Isabel. .”

  Isabel was apologizing for the mess. She planned on cleaning as soon as she knew what she was doing; she was weepy about the car, the shock and expense of it, and then she was speaking about Ned: How often she had heard herself asking, “But you’re not a fuck, are you?” And his answering, “Yes, I am.”

  Isabel said, “Dinah, I’m so sorry.”
<
br />   “I know,” Dinah said, and she looked around the room and appeared delighted and surprised at her own foresight: “I sent Nan.”

  “New screens?” Sally asked.

  “Just Nan, Nan Black.”

  “It’s so bright,” Sally said. “I don’t remember its being so bright.”

  Isabel pushed herself out from the couch, saying, “I’ve been throwing away a lot of Ned’s crap.” Why did she always pick mean words? “Some clothes are nice and a few books.”

  “Don’t give away his books,” Dinah said. “He should have them.”

  The three women on the stairs — Sally held the banister as if it were the handle to a suitcase — ostensibly to look over whatever Isabel had labeled nice. At the landing, Isabel watched as what seemed dank and threatening, oppressively wallpapered on the sunless side of the house dried, darkened, and turned softly old in Dinah’s company. The wide-board floors painted gray were smooth enough to walk on barefoot, but Isabel was in the habit of slipping off her slippers at the edge of the bed and otherwise wearing them. Now she saw what Clive meant but Sally wasn’t too tall for the Bridge House. She walked through the house comfortably, seeming happy in the fact that the house worked: Lights, door handles, locks; room to room she walked until she reached the room Ned had seized to work in — and why not? No one ever said he wasn’t selfish. Isabel stood with Sally and Dinah at the opened windows. The clamorous brilliancy of the bay was not tamed even at this distance from this height. The height made Isabel dizzy and she stepped back just as Sally sat on the table, the same Ned used for work. “Ah, hah!” Sally said. “Where the magic happens?” and she used her arm as a dust rag over the powdered surface. “Was he working here?” Sally asked.

  The house faltered. “I thought,” Isabel said, and she steadied herself on the desk edge and wondered that the time Ned had spent in this wide room with all its light should yield up the parts he had read her, indulgences, lugubrious and trite — except that Carol Bane had approved. In consideration of events in the world the only noble calling was to report on them. Where were the orphans in Ned’s work but he was sitting under an umbrella table with a silly woman feeding table scraps to dogs? What did a person say to such audacity as Ned’s? To write a memoir didn’t a person have to suffer a little?

  Sweet Neddie, he seemed so, seemed so _________. Fill in the blank. Blank? Ned was on his way to Bermuda — he had told her as much.

  Sally was talking about the view while Dinah was opening closets, saying, “I’m told there’s an old Electrolux somewhere?”

  “I’m going to let you look around,” Isabel said to the women, for which they both apologized, looking around.

  “I haven’t seen the house since Dad bought it,” Sally said.

  Dad, Isabel heard, and she thought, Clive, and she saw that the woman uttering the word Dad was her age, and she was ill at ease again. “I’ll be in the back outside,” Isabel said. “Take your time,” she said, but whose house was this? What house? The Bridge House was unstable and teetering.

  When had this started?

  Weeks ago: She had seen the front door of the Bridge House open onto the ocean, and in the distance a small boat, tinier and plainer than Brueghel’s, was moving away equally indifferent to Isabel’s dilemma: how to get out of the Bridge House? Even out of the house, she felt endangered, which was stupid. She was safe indoors and out. The sea was nowhere near. Nothing was tilted but her vision of Ned, lying on the backyard bulkhead to the cellar, head tipped back, eyes shut, sculpted throat sacrificially thrust forward. The backyard was wildly untended, full of high danger. Here in the backyard was where he told her he was sorry, he felt it was best, he knew now, he was leaving. Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe! As You Like It was a violent comedy, though the last time she saw it, she had cried when old Adam died onstage, reverenced at the fire by the banished duke’s men.

  The reward of long service is no more service.

  But on to other considerations. Will Ben Harris catch up to his quick-witted wife? Of everyone involved she felt sorriest for Ben — no, she felt sorriest for herself.

  *

  After Sally and Dinah had gone, putting dibs on nothing, all of it crap, Isabel stood near a closet holding on to the sleeve of Ned’s shirt. A terrible stillness in her ears, some empty sound.

  Only weeks ago, she had driven to a deserted house off the Reach Road and there had broken what windows in the house were left to break.

  Ned had said he didn’t know what it was about her but he did not find her sexy. Maybe it was her clothes. She was so often in doubt.

  “What clothes?”

  “My point,” he said. “Exactly.”

  How nasty it seemed now that he should have criticized her wardrobe. Isabel in the Bridge House packed up Ned’s clothes; a slouchy, dirt-colored sweater she kept. He hadn’t left much behind. The long socks knotted in his sock drawer she threw away. Anything with a netted interior, of course, was also out. Haha.

  In the last week she had told him that his penis was small.

  That his penis was small, he knew; but her cunt, he said, was enormous.

  In whatever game it was they played, Ned and Isabel had made a point of staying even.

  “You want me to pay attention,” Ned said, “I know. I’m trying.”

  She curled his belt in a shoe box for charity, but his hairbrush she kept for his smell.

  Why do that?

  How could she explain herself to herself or to anyone? Both of them from elsewhere, they had lived in different cities. New York, the longest. Columbia first, West Ninety-eighth, later the White Street loft. Left unused, the White Street loft was an overturned fishbowl: unwashed windows in punishing southern light. Caught air — terrible — but now, night after night, to put herself to sleep, she passed through the White Street loft swiping her hand over onyx edges and surfaces that started liquidy and cool, then turned solid. The hard immovables: column, sill, headboard. Hard headboard, yes, built-in and recessed. Was that possible and was it possible in just a summer to forget? Isabel walked down the long hall past the La Jolla scenes, large black-and-white photographs of Ned and his mother, Pet, and so to sleep, but the Bridge House roused her, a sound.

  “Who’s here?”

  Why here? Why was she here and not in the White Street loft, but when she thought of the White Street loft, really thought of it, Ned was in the loft, and he was shoving her against the sharp cube that passed for a sofa.

  She did not want to hear Ned, but she heard him, saying, “My problem is I’m so quickly bored.”

  For a time, fucking, being fucked, being hurt, then not being fucked. The astonished splatter in unlikely places, red on a far white wall — oh, Isabel could be bloody and dramatic, but in the end, Ned had outdone her with his exit. I don’t want any of the stuff I’ve left. The car’s yours. Then he called a taxi to the airport. Now what?

  As soon as she sold the car, she would go back to the White Street loft.

  Last night she had dreamed Fife had drowned off a beach in Corfu but come back to life. Fife twisted in a dance and told her she was common, she was dull — cement had more color. How could someone as mean as Fife die? She had never believed it, his drowning, so his resurrection seemed right. Then the dream scene changed and Fife stood naked in a tub in a middle-brow bathroom, everything ordinary — a house somehow hers and he knew it. Oh, the self-consciousness she experienced in dreams! Fife stood looking out at her, making dismissive appraisals — professional name? “What profession? Unless you’re doing business with your crease.” She pulled the curtain across his face all the while seeing his face grow long and desperate, putty mobility with a hole for howling and then the tub broke apart and all turned black with the blunt conclusiveness she knew for hell. He fell before he had a chance to change expressions. Gone that fast, forever and ever. Amen. When she woke she was relieved, for how could she be afraid of someone who was dead to her?

  *

  At the Clam Box so many week
s ago Dinah had met Isabel for the first time. She had met Ned, too, a girl more than a boy with small, decisive features, sleepy eyes, side part. Caramel as a color of hair on him looked new; he was a sleek boy in an ad for cologne, ambivalent or shy. Dinah remembered how she had looked at Ned more emboldened than she was wont to be and afraid. Over steamers Dinah told him she wouldn’t want to be any part of any kind of interview with Clive, especially one that might turn into more, into a long story, a novel, some sort of book. He had asked would she talk to him on other subjects then, and she had said, yes — boldly. He never visited but once, and that, for the last time.

  Dinah and Clive beyond the checkout at the Trade Winds grocery resumed their conversation about the Bournes. “How did you know Ned was talented?” Dinah asked.

  “He told me. He told me his agent was Carol Bane.”

  “Who’s Carol Bane?”

  “I don’t know. He said her name in a way that made me think I should know.”

  Clive, in loose clothing, scootered the grocery cart and hiked on, a kind of skateboard, stuttering down the incline to the car. Here in the parking lot, in the yellowing middle of things, some reds out there, thrashed colors, his shirt was flying open; his pants were full of air. He offered his high spirits for the ride home. The anodyne of cheer; he said he was healed and whole; he lacked for nothing. And she? Dinah? Isabel, Sally? Who needed pills?

  Sally needed pills. Dinah had seen her shake some out, not count, and take them.

  “They seem to be working,” he said. “She holds still longer.”

  “You are so critical.”

  He was not! He was lost in good feeling! He had his fox — he didn’t deserve her. What a sight in the high grass. Years earlier a suggestion of horses in motion stampeding toward the viewer, a palette of blues, whites, yellows, greens. Not much green, not like now; then his misery had been in the making of the paintings: to be bound indoors, tender treatment, on his butt all day because of a heel spur that had brought him to the ground when first he stepped on it — pain! A bone was broken.